I don’t think Obama realizes — or, more frighteningly, perhaps he doesn’t care — what this spending is going to do to the economy. After all, the free market is just a rival power center. As Tim Noah says: ‘On Wall Street, financial crisis destroys jobs. Here in Washington, it creates them. The rest is just details.”
I’ll have more thoughts on this Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy tomorrow at PJM.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Glenn’s post was motivated by Megan McArdle’s thoughts on deficits, and who to blame for them:
The problem with the budget deficit is not any particular program, or even any particular tax cuts. It is not that George Bush or Obama is a bad person who does bad things. The problem with the budget deficit is that, unlike the deficits George Bush ran, the deficits projected under Obama (and beyond) are actually large enough to potentially precipitate a fiscal crisis. If our interest rates suddenly spiked up, perhaps because lenders were worried about the size of our budget deficits, we’d find ourselves in the kind of nasty fiscal jam that regularly plagues third-world countries. The difference is, no one has enough money to bail us out.
Obama is the one who will have to prevent this. Yet instead of plans, we’re getting fairy numbers from the OMB. That’s worrying, and it’s sure not George W. Bush’s fault. His OMB liked to inflate the deficit projections, so that they could take credit for a mostly imaginary reduction.
It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.
Ignorance is definitely better than malice. Ignorance can be cured.
Sadly, Obama is really smart and has had 40+ years to read and understand Hayek or Bastiat. This leads me to the conclusion of malice aforethought.
“the free market is just a rival power center”
That is 100% on the mark. There is no public problem this administration cares to solve. They just want the power they would need to do it.
Cracks are forming in the President’s facade of massive popularity.
The Democrats in the House, especially the Blue Dogs, may find that their interests lie at cross-purposes to those of the President.
And if the President is indeed acting with malice, he will become an extraordinarily weak Chief Executive very quickly.
Not good for the Republic, but I didn’t think his election was good for the Republic. I still don’t.
“It’s almost like he wants to wreck the economy.”
A healthy US economy is a major obstacle to bringing about global equality.